Re: Her Majesty’s Jihadists

May 1, 2015

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CreditPhoto illustration by Giles Revell

It was, in the words of Mika Brzezinski on “Morning Joe,” “revelatory”: In her April 19 cover story, Mary Anne Weaver reported that more British Muslims had joined Islamist militias like ISIS and the Nusra Front than are serving the British Army.

One reader on Twitter wrote, “I think that’s more due to the lack of appeal of the British Army than any appeal ISIS can claim.” Another commenter, identified on nytimes.com as Imperial Ahmed, suggested that “discriminatory policies against Muslim citizens has led them to be disenfranchised.”

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CreditIllustration by Tom Gauld

On “Morning Joe,” the host, Joe Scarborough, pointed out that the story challenged worn assumptions about “the disaffected young Arab man, who comes from a poor background, who has been trampled underfoot by western hegemony.” Many of the recruits were well off and highly educated. “This is not a movement of the lumpenproletariat,” Weaver said on the show.

Much of the article focused on the work of the International Center for the Study of Radicalization (I.C.S.R.) at King’s College London, where researchers develop relationships with foreign fighters to gather information about their motivations. A senior researcher, Shiraz Maher, told Weaver, “Obama doesn’t know what a 25-year-old manager at Primark does, but if he goes to Syria and becomes involved with the Islamic State, he goes from being the manager of a second-rate clothing store to someone giving headaches to the president of the United States.”

“This jibes with the psych research,” wrote Drake Baer at Business Insider, citing two studies. At DePaul University, he wrote, researchers found that “people who perceive themselves as having low status are more violent than people who are high-status.” The second study, at the University of Southern California, found that “power without status is especially dangerous.” Baer wrote that “when people feel powerful, they don’t censor their actions.”

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CreditIllustration by Tom Gauld

The article also looked at the work of Cage, an organization that campaigns against the war on terror, and one of its most prominent advocates, Moazzam Begg, a former Guantánamo detainee who spent nearly three years in prison and was later released without charge. Cage activists have also concluded that foreigners become jihadists because they seek a sense of power and legitimacy.

Weaver also wrote of controversy surrounding Cage: Its research director, Asim Qureshi, was in contact with Mohammed Emwazi, before he became known as Jihadi John. In interviews, Qureshi suggested that British-intelligence harassment contributed to Emwazi’s radicalization. But some readers were unsatisfied. “How did the reporter miss writing about how controversial Cage is?” asked Salil Tripathi on Twitter.

It is an election year in Britain, where debate over the rising number of foreign fighters joining Islamist militias has led to a security bill, passed in February, that allows officials to temporarily prohibit re-entry of suspected foreign fighters and to seize the passports of would-be jihadists.

Civil rights activists, including Begg, argue that the law will further radicalize young Muslims. On HuffPost Live, Weaver suggested that repentant jihadists “be in the forefront of repatriation,” discouraging other young Muslims from going to Iraq and Syria. But for some readers, the new legislation was not enough. “If they go, never, ever, ever let them come back,” wrote a commenter identified as Justice Holmes, on nytimes.com.

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